“You might have said,” Jacob remarked, “‘I hope you are wrong. I hope that you are not going to die very soon.’”
“What difference would that have made?” Rudyard replied.
They passed a church where a hearse and other cars awaited the departure for the cemetery. Jacob, as was his wont, wanted to pause to see the coffin carried from the church to the hearse, for now as ever the joys of strict observation were important to him. But Rudyard refused to stop.
“Who wants to see a funeral, anyway?” said Rudyard, and Jacob, discerning the excess of emotion in Rudyard’s voice, yielded to him.
“Two years ago, when a very gifted student died suddenly,” said Jacob, “Israel Brown was asked by the family to make the funeral sermon, for the family as well as the student were without religious belief. The sermon was given in the auditorium of the Ethical Culture School. Israel Brown spoke very well, as he always does. He spoke of the gifts of the dead young man, remarking upon his original gift for certain subjects and making clear the difficulty in general of mastering these subjects. Yet all felt that this might have been a classroom and not the ceremony for the death of a young man. Now what kind of a life is this, anyway? Something important and irreparable occurs and we have nothing to say.”
Moved by these thoughts, Jacob told Rudyard of a recent effort which he had kept secret. Six months before, in mid-winter when tours of the neighborhood were unpleasant, he had written a short novel, although he had never before thought of being that kind of an author. The short novel had seemed good to him. He had placed the manuscript in his desk “to cool off,” as he explained. When two months had passed, he had read his short novel again and decided that it was worthless. It was a Sunday afternoon in April, just before Jacob was due from habit and principle to tour the neighborhood and see what he entitled “the Sunday look.”
Depressed and benumbed that his short novel was worthless, Jacob arose from his desk, went to the window, and gazed at the park, full of human beings of each generation, infants, children, adolescents, parents, the middle-aged, and the old.
Regarding them, he said to himself, “I reject one million dollars, the highest prize of our society. For if I had one million dollars, what good would it do me? It would not help me to make this short novel, which is worthless, a short novel which is good. I can say then that I have discovered that a million dollars are worthless to me, since they cannot help me to satisfy the desire and hope which was important, intimate, and dear to me.”
Rudyard told the circle of this discovery when Jacob was absent, and they were very much moved and impressed. Often after that, when they were among strangers, they spoke of “the great moment,” and “the great rejection.” When strangers wished to know what this moment was, they were left unanswered, except that Edmund often said that Jacob had discovered the essential vanity and emptiness of our society. The success of these teasing sentences about “the great recognition,” made the boys invent variations, delicious to them, of the enigmatic sentences. It was said that Jacob has renounced a million dollars; Jacob has rejected a million dollars; Jacob has recognized that a million dollars are worthless.
Thus it came about that for the wrong reasons outsiders and strangers suffered the illusion that Jacob was a fabulous heir.
Yet at this time Jacob’s feeling about himself and about the circle was undergoing a change.
“We have all come to a standstill,” he said to himself, “as on an escalator, for time is passing, but we remain motionless.”
“What do I want?” he continued, “Do I know what I want? Does anyone know what he or she wants?”
He decided to visit Edmund, who had once again endured the period when scholarships and teaching appointments are awarded and who had once again been rejected. In seeking to find motives or reasons to explain his rejection, Edmund let himself go into a kind of hysteria, discussing the matter with anyone he found to listen, speaking of his rare and many labors, and making use of a terminology which no one but a peer in his subject could understand. This had occurred at this time for the past five years and the circle found Edmund’s obsession with it boring. Consequently when Francis French had entered in the midst of Edmund’s monologue with a piece of sensational news everyone had stopped listening to Edmund, and Edmund, much offended, arose and departed, and he had now been absent from the circle for more than a week.
This was the reason that Jacob, the conscience of the circle, visited Edmund, keeping silent, however, about Edmund’s offended departure.
“Do you know,” said Jacob, seating himself in an armchair in Edmund’s study, “practically everyone is unhappy, though few will admit the fact?”
“Yes,” said Edmund, pleased by the renewal of this theme, “that’s just what I’ve been thinking. It would be hard to overestimate the amount of unhappiness in America. The cause can’t be just the depression, though I don’t want to slight the depression, for obviously the rich are just as unhappy as the poor, though in different ways.”
“Yes,” said Jacob, “it is not only the depression. The depression is as much an effect as a cause, and the amount of unhappiness was perhaps as great in 1928 as in 1934.”
“I know just what you mean,” said Edmund, “I saw the other day that ninety-five per cent of the bathtubs in the world are in America. Now if anyone reflects sufficiently upon this interesting fact, he will conclude with the whole story of America.”
“Everyone feels that it is necessary to have certain things of a certain quality and kind,” said Jacob.
“Bathtubs come from an obsession with personal hygiene, the most consummate form of Puritan feeling,” said Edmund, “but the essential point is that human beings waste the best years of their only life for the sake of such a thing as a shining automobile, the latest model. Since such things are regarded as the truly important, good, and valuable things, is it any wonder that practically everyone is unhappy?”
“The fault is not this desire for things,” said Jacob, “but the way in which the motive of competition is made the chief motive of life, encouraged everywhere. Think of how competition is celebrated in games, in schools, in the professions, in every kind of activity. Consequently, the ideas of success and of failure are the two most important ideas in America. Yet it’s obvious that most human beings are going to be failures, for such is the nature of competition. Perhaps then the ideas of success and failure ought to be established as immoral. This strikes me as a truly revolutionary idea, although I suppose it has occurred to others.”
“It has occurred to you,” said Edmund, “as it has occurred to me because we are both failures, and we have to be young men in a time of failure and defeat, during the black years of the great depression.”
“Yes, we are both failures,” said Jacob, “but I have no desire for the only kinds of success that are available. The other day I heard the cruelest question I ever expect to hear. Two composers met at a music festival in the Berkshires last summer and one of them said to the other: ‘Calvin, why are we both failures?’ That’s more cruel than any other question I ever heard. The other one answered him in a hurry: ‘I am not a failure,’ he said, ‘I am not a failure because I never wanted to be a success.’ That’s the way I feel too. Nevertheless the fact remains that practically everyone is unhappy. Now if the idea of love supplanted the ideas of success and failure, how joyous everyone might be! and how different the quality of life!”
“You’re just dreaming out loud,” said Edmund to Jacob, thinking again of how he had failed once more to be appointed a teacher.